Robin Bowles - Death on the Derwent

DEATH ON THE DERWENT

In 1996, Robin Bowles read a newspaper report about the alleged suicide of Victorian country housewife Jennifer Tanner. Guessing there might be a book in the story behind the news, she closed her PR consultancy for a year and wrote her first book, Blind Justice . Shes written a bestseller almost every year since, including the definitive books on the Jaidyn Leskie murder, Justice Denied , and on the disappearance and alleged murder of British tourist Peter Falconio, Dead Centre . She has covered the controversial murder of interior designer Stuart Rattle, and the equally controversial coroners finding regarding the death of Phoebe Handsjuk.

During her 20 years as an investigative writer, she also obtained a university diploma to qualify her as a private inquiry agent. She was a national convenor of Sisters in Crime Australia for ten years, and is now a proud Life Member. Robin lives in Melbourne with her husband, Clive, and her detective dog, Miss Deva.

Scribe Publications
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Published by Scribe 2019

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Copyright 2019 F.U.N. & K.Y. P/L

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

9781925713176 (paperback edition)
9781925693669 (e-book)

A CiP entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.

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This book is for all those dedicated people all over the world who never give in and never give up in the never-ending fight for truth and justice in particular, those committed to achieving justice for Sue Neill-Fraser.

I hope this book discloses the truth,
and that justice will be done.

CONTENTS

PART ONE. THE DISAPPEARANCE

PART TWO. TRIAL BY JURY

PART THREE. THE UNRAVELLING

INTRODUCTION

The law will never make men free;
it is men who have got to make the law free.

HENRI THOREAU

For readers who do not know of me, I have been writing in the true-crime genre for the past 20 years. I have interviewed dozens of accused and thousands of people associated with them. I have also been privileged to encounter members of a growing band of individuals and institutions who act tirelessly, in our country and overseas, to prevent injustice and miscarriage of justice. Theodore Roosevelt said, Justice consists not in being neutral between right and wrong, but in finding the right and upholding it, wherever found, against the wrong. There are now many people around the world acting upon this exhortation, and some of the leaders live in Australia.

We all like to think that if we have an altercation with the law, deserved or not, we will receive justice. But what is justice? What is the justice system? It is just a system. And like other systems, it can malfunction. Especially when you throw in passion, maybe murder, egos, tradition, liars, cheats, and thieves all are part of the system.

The law is a series of rules that each human society lives by. The rules can differ from one culture to the next, but many of them overlap. If we break these rules, the legal system (not the justice system) intervenes. The outcome is not always perceived as just. Sometimes it is plain wrong. But a lot of people have skin in the game from the commission of a crime to the delivery of a verdict. Lots of knots are tied along the way and sometimes those knots are almost impossible to undo if a mistake has been made. At times, the legal system mistakenly assimilates justice to expediency.

I first became interested in the case of Sue Neill-Fraser in early 2015. I am very familiar with Tasmania, as I lived there from 1977 to 1987, working first as a nurse and then running a PR business. My parents lived there, and my kids and grandkids still live there, so Im a regular visitor. As a nurse and later a PR professional, I learnt a lot about the unique way Tasmania is run whos who in the zoo.

Sometime in 2015, after all of Sues appeals were done, the mother of her daughters husband rang me in Melbourne, where I live. She was a reader of my books and wanted me to write something, to help Sue. While I was thinking about it (I wasnt sure anything I could write would change anything), during one of my visits to Tasmania, my son told me about the same case, and I realised that Bob Chappell, who was married to Yvonne long before he met Sue, had lived next door to my widowed mother for several years. Indeed, Bob had saved her life. Coming home at lunch time to collect some items while Yvonne was away with the kids on school holidays (he and Yvonne were separating), he found my 78-year-old mother on the ground in her back yard, having fallen over the day before and spent the cold night in the open with a badly fractured leg. She was already in shock when he found her, and he called the ambulance, contacted me at the hospital where Bob and I both worked, and generally saved the day. My mother was five months in hospital after that, so it had been touch and go. Just one of many coincidences youll find in this story. In a strange way, I felt I owed something to Bob to dig a bit deeper into the circumstances of his death.

As I looked into Sues case more closely, I found it wasnt just her family who were concerned shed been wrongly convicted: so was half of Hobart. Although shed been previously unknown to most of them, the verdict had polarised the Tasmanian community. Many legal and justice campaigners around Australia were also very disturbed by how shed ended up being sentenced, in a circumstantial case, to 23 years in prison. It was the first murder conviction in Tasmanian legal history with no body, and one of very few in the history of Australia. She continued to proclaim her innocence.

This story is told in three parts. The first part is about the disappearance of Bob Chappell the strangeness and mystery of it all. The second part summarises the way the case was dealt with by the legal system. The third part, and this is when it becomes really interesting, tells of the way the ongoing challenging of the legal system by concerned people was dealt with by others, who had skin in the game. In my 20 years of meeting and mixing with law-makers and law breakers, Ive never experienced anything like it. In many ways, as someone who knows Tasmania and its culture and customs, its politics and its social setup very well, I was uniquely placed to write this book. And there was that link with Bob. I dont want to spoil the story, so I wont go into more detail yet.

Sue Neill-Fraser was convicted on circumstantial I was going to write evidence, but actually, stories is more accurate. I have no opinion I will publish as to whether Sue did or did not kill Bob Chappell, but I do not think she was justly convicted. I feel really sorry for members of the jury, copping so much criticism. They did exactly the right thing. It was the process that was flawed.

Here is a definition of circumstantial conviction, which has stood the test of time since 1875. (Just shows you how slow the law is to change.) Often quoted as a classic statement on the position, the definition comes from Lord Cairns in Re Belhaven and Stenton Peerage (1875) 1 App Cas 278 at 279:

... in dealing with circumstantial evidence, we have to consider the weight which is to be given to the united force of all the circumstances put together. You may have a ray of light so feeble that by itself it will do little to elucidate a dark corner. But on the other hand, you may have a number of rays, each of them insufficient, but all converging and brought to bear upon the same point, and, when united, producing a body of illumination which will clear away the darkness which you are endeavouring to dispel.